On the usefulness of the "safe" rating

I'm aware that this board has been in existence for a long time - and has had many people put a ton work into making it a great place. I'm grateful for that, and by no means intend to denigrate all that history, or want to come off as an arrogant, know-it-all newb. I realize my post is just a tiny, insignificant blip in the many, many years of Danbooru' existence. Instead what I would like to do is to just humbly ask a question from the regular contributors here, and share some thoughts I had.

Ok so with that preamble out of the way - I was curious if there's been any talk earlier about perhaps utilizing more ratings on this site, or more specifically, on splitting the safe rating into multiple categories? From what I can gather at a glance there seems to be over 5 million images that all comprise the safe rating, whereas the amount of individual tags is pretty staggering. In practice that seems to mean that combing through more voluminous tags which have tons of different kinds of content proves to be very cumbersome. So wouldn't having a couple more categories (ratings) be a boon to all the users, who could much more easily find the specific stuff they are looking for?

The way that I personally encounter these issues, is that I find that there's often many weird, completely non-sexual images in the mix, when I use a variety of tags to find good smut. However just blacklisting "rating:s:" is not ideal, since I also noticed that the "safe" rating not only contains those images, but also many with a vivid sexual tone to them. As I see it, there's 3 different categories within the "safe" rating that are vastly different - and could be (in theory) easily separated from each other. If you'll allow, I would like to demonstrate that here. I'll focus on girls due to my personal preferences.

Category A, pictures which have a suggestive sexual nature to them (girls with skimpy/fetish clothing, disrobed or suggestive angle/situation):

https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4966606
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/3472362
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246473
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5233235
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4973989
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246670
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4806377
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5123238
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5245681
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/173565

Category B, pictures with attractive girls, but no clear erotic nature to them:

https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5245514
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246334
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246388
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5245749
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246460

Category C, pictures that focus on other things besides beautiful girls:

https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246116
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246028
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246269
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5246361
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5245941
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5245555

Anyways that's just my $0.02 on what I feel perhaps could be a positive change for this site. But I definitely though have zero expectations and no entitlement whatsoever about this. I only wish to spark a constructive conversation if what I said here is of any merit.

I say it all the time, but Danbooru uploaders should be a liitttttle bit more aware of what the ratings actually mean.
Right now, even ass_focus images get rated safe.

You won'T solve that issue with multiple safe categories, but it needs a mentality overhaul.

We all know rating:s is a joke. We've had discussions over having a fourth rating to split up rating:s posts into actual safe posts and boobs with their girls hanging out that people refuse to tag Q. Adding another rating would be trivial, really, but we all know nobody would ever sort out the rating:s posts we already have, and new uploads would probably just poison the new rating because users are stupid, so there's not been much push to do so.

As an aside, blacklisting rating:s is impractical since it's client-side filtering and will just lead to most searches having the entire page hidden, aside from posts which are inherently sexual where it wouldn't matter anyway.

To compound on what Talulah said, rating:s functionally is not "safe for work". It is more akin to "safe for marketing", given how often you'll see sexualized individuals. women or men, in media (obviously some of Category A would still not fall under that, but I hope my point is made).

Having an actual "safe for work" rating would be incredibly useful, but as Talulah notes, it would take extensive work to go through everything and tag it properly. You'd need to mount a multi-user effort just to get a small bit of it done.

Talulah said:

blacklisting rating:s is impractical

At the moment I would just be really grateful if I could somehow filter "Category C" type of results from my searches. Sort of the opposite of only wanting to see truly safe images. That could be either through the blacklist, or indeed through a tag like -category:c (if there was such a rating) which would not just hide them but actually not even include them in the search. I'm tired of seeing weird pictures that are not even pretty full-clothed girls popping up when I want to look at sexy stuff.

Damian0358 said:

Having an actual "safe for work" rating would be incredibly useful, but as Talulah notes, it would take extensive work to go through everything and tag it properly. You'd need to mount a multi-user effort just to get a small bit of it done.

If you decide to do this kind of change in the future, count me in! I'm definitely more than willing to significantly contribute for this. Doing it on a date-based system (1st of Jan 2007, 2nd of Jan 2007 etc.) might not prove too overwhelming

My personal suggestion was to make ratings into two checkmarks, "sexually suggestive" and "nudity".
That way tasteful nudity wouldn't be grouped in with sexual content, and sexual content wouldn't be grouped in with safe content.
The crux of the matter is that you wouldn't expect an ass focus post in a rating:s search, but at the same time, would you expect a completely clothed character in a rating:q search?
This clash of philosophies and the arbitrary nature of how things are perceived by people is why most of the time only artworks which are objectively unsafe are rated not safe (read: "if you can't see a nipple, penis, or vagina, it's fair game").

I remember evazion having plans to push a "safe+" rating, for artworks that aren't quite safe but aren't questionable either, but i'm not sure whether he's abandoned the idea or not.

Username_Hidden said:

My personal suggestion was to make ratings into two checkmarks, "sexually suggestive" and "nudity".
That way tasteful nudity wouldn't be grouped in with sexual content, and sexual content wouldn't be grouped in with safe content.

It's understandable how the more people there are, the harder it's to come to an agreement. I like what you suggested though - there could be an 'explicit' rating which could cover all the true smut and then a 'suggestive' rating which would additionally incorporate Category A. In addition you could split "safe" into two different groups; "chaste" for Category B and perhaps "other" (or some better term) for Category C.

Overcomplicating the rating system is just reinventing tags. We already have a way to say if something has nudity or is sexually suggestive. Making them part of ratings is a horrible idea.

Previous discussions on the subject: topic #5435, topic #12067, topic #18572.

Notwithstanding the monumental effort required to re-rate literally millions of posts, I feel like any attempt to solve the problems with ratings by adding a fourth category is ultimately doomed to failure. We can't even trust some users to rate their posts properly with the categories we have, so what do you think will happen when we add yet another notch to the scale?